axont [any, they/them]

I think the implication is we’re addicted to a magical potion that transforms us into an evil alter ego who causes mischief in town

And then we get to hang out with Abbott and Costello

Yes I go into a phone booth as my normal commie antifa self and come out as Chudly Dugsfermpt local pool supply company owner and lover of Milton Friedman

I’m getting the impression from Lemmy that there’s an overrepresentation of the particular demographic of comfortable middle-aged bookish software engineers who live in the US or Canada.

Naval Facility Okinawa is one of the more controversial. There’s also Fort Magsaysay in the Philippines, along with others in the region. The US really does have China surrounded on multiple fronts.

The largest American overseas base is Camp Humphreys in South Korea, which comprises of over 500 individual buildings and cost $11 billion.

Don’t worry, sometimes there will be freak years where ocean currents reverse or something and there are widespread cold snaps and crops die

That depends, but it’s probably irrelevant in France. Some churches expect women to wear head coverings, like in the eastern Orthodox church. Mennonite women wear bonnets. Some very fundamentalist churches ban wearing mixed fabrics.

There are also mormons, who wear the “temple garment” underwear

An abaya isn’t religious, they’re just worn in places that are usually Muslim and often worn by Muslims. This is racist discrimination.

do you trust the state of France to do something that largely targets Muslims and there to be a positive outcome? Furthermore I should mention the abaya isn’t even religious, it’s just a dress worn by some people of northern African or middle eastern culture/ancestry. Nothing about Islam mandates wearing it and not all Muslims wear abayas.

listen, only about 50% of Cubans profess they’re part of a religion, compared to other places in the Caribbean like the Dominican Republic where the number is a much higher 97%. Cuba didn’t ban religion outright or wearing religious clothes, they banned religions from operating public services, charities, etc. The Cuban government gave people things that religions had previously given them, rather than taking away things like what kinds of clothes they could wear.

even if you’re an atheist and you believe in secularizing the entire world, changing beliefs, do you really think the way you do that is by first deciding what kids are allowed to wear to school? Do you think there are any positive ways to persecute a religious group, not even the leadership or whatever, but persecuting literal children and telling them which clothes to wear? If you’re some kind of atheist proselytizer then I’d expect you wanna go for methods that actually work.

I’m gonna quote an obscure guy named Marx you don’t seem to have read much of:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

if you wanna criticize religion, then criticize the thing that makes religion happen, namely human suffering. Don’t cause more suffering. Demand people’s real happiness.

Do you think a requirement of being atheist means you have to embarrass kids or be racist? Do you think atheists have a moral obligation to do genuine persecution against people for wearing a robe?

Secularism in education doesn’t mean you have to strictly control what clothes kids wear. Just don’t have private religious schools, it’s as easy as that. That’s what socialist governments do when they have a secular state ideology, they ban religious schools, shelters, hospitals, etc and replace them with secular, public ones. They don’t ban religion outright because that’s absurd, it’s a waste of time, and it’s needless cruelty.

Why does it matter if some people are Muslim? Do atheists have a moral obligation to control what Muslims wear or believe? Why?

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I don’t think you could define this as strictly not racist, since “race” constitutes arbitrary characteristics decided upon largely by white hegemony. It’s how Africans became a singular black race despite being different cultures and language groups. It’s why Jews are sometimes white, sometimes not.

It’s absolutely why most Americans consider a native Spanish speaker a different race, no matter how white they are. We’re in a moment where being Muslim is a racial marker excluding a person from whiteness.

Here’s a trick I do. Go show an uniformed white American a picture of Bashar al-Assad. Every time I’ve done this, they’ll say he’s a white guy. Then tell them he’s the president of Syria and a Muslim. They instantly flip.

My favorite part is where Zizek, in good faith, asked Peterson to name a few of the Marxist professors. (Peterson at this point of the debate had been saying academia had been seized by Marxist malefactors). Peterson couldn’t name any.

Zizek offered the name David Harvey, a highly influential British Marxist professor known for his commentary on Capital. Peterson had never heard of him.

I like how every year he somehow gets worse. I didn’t think he could descend further from professor so annoying he refuses to call students by their preferred names. After the Zizek debate where he had no clue what he was talking about, he’s become like a Charles Dickens character. He’s like a crazy uncle kept in the attic because he’s lost his mind from laudanum.

i’m only mildly exaggerating

Hell I realized myself the other day that there were two leaders between Deng and Xi who I couldn’t name and know basically nothing about.

Oh well that’s easy, before Xi Jinping there was Hu Jintao, who was a kind of moderate technocratic kind of guy. Always about plans and numbers. And before Jintao there was a magic toad wizard who wore George Romero glasses and would yell at journalists when they asked him stupid shit

there’s a cool website called myspace where you can chill with friends

Possibly because of the way he’s found his career. Paxton is very popular in France and was very instrumental in introducing liberal historiography into French WW2 history. For him to throw a bone to Marxists would be undermining how he earned a name for himself in the first place.

Personally I don’t believe the term authoritarianism is a useful description of anything. It’s too vague. I’ve seen one definition that’s like “a system that rejects the involvement of certain groups or interests from the political process.” Well that would be all socialist nations by default, since socialist countries by definition have denied political representation for the capitalist class in some way.

A better question is: How is a socialist country supposed to defend itself? It may not be possible for a country to achieve what Marx called upper-phase communism. It may not be possible for money, states, and all property to be abolished. That’s a question for the future. But when a country tries to curtail the power of capitalists, even attempts to create what’s known as true communism, they find themselves on the receiving end of an entire world against them. Sanctions, invasions, sabotage, spying. The shape that a socialist country will take is the result of its conditions. We’re living in a world dominated by capital and socialist countries represent a resistance against capital. If socialist movements are threatened, they either defend themselves or collapse.

You’re right that countries are dancing to the imperialists, because the imperialists hold the most power right now. That’s why an anti-imperialist movement is important, why a multi-polar world is important. Once the threat of imperialism subsides or is defeated, then I’m going to guess socialist countries will begin to express their policies differently.

I don’t think I’m comfortable with a central power having the authority to decide that certain groups don’t have rights, that power is too often abused widely.

Is there any society that isn’t this? A central authority deciding how to distribute rights is a governing body.

Socialism is a movement about denying the right of property to capitalists. That’s the entire purpose of the movement, to elevate working class people to the point of dominating society and to restrain or abolish the capitalist class. Landlords and capitalists shouldn’t be able to exercise the same rights they have in a liberal capitalist nation. Fascists, racists, transphobes, imperialists, etc shouldn’t have any civil liberties and should be subject to arrest, reeducation, or worse.

Yeah we’re still in a position where American fascism doesn’t even recognize itself in the mirror. It doesn’t realize it’s a movement that needs coherent aims. It’s still stuck in the American paradigm of politics as consumerism. A comrade the other day here said the explicit kind of American fascism is having a hard time getting off the ground because they refuse to adopt socialist rhetoric, like European fascist movements in the past.

Not sure how Cuban party dues work, but I do know there’s an application process and not everyone gets membership. Not sure how it works in regards to income level either